My Walks Behind The House

I live in Northern Canada and fall is such an inspiration to me. I thought I would document some of the eye candy I see every day when I take little Ripley for her walk.

Here we are walking behind my house-this is in my yard:

Notice how the trail goes up slightly? About 2 minutes walk up this little hill from my back door I see this:

Is that fantastic or what??? I always pause at this point and just look around. I didn’t get a chance as the light was fading, but the mountains wrap around 3/4 of the way.

Although I have only seen about 5 people on the trails in over 3 years (seriously!), obviously others enjoy this area. It is on Queen’s Land, so open to all.

This bench is 6 minutes from the back door.

  See Ripley?  :-)

 

Fall is here and the leaves have changed colour or in this case, are gone.

About 10 minutes from my house, I reach this area. It is a small section of the Yukon River. There is also a bench here to rest, meditate or just enjoy the scenery.

The green trees are pine and evergreen. There are no green leaves left. In the North, you get yellow or orange leaves only. We do not have any (or few) native red leafed trees. 

 The area at the bottom is a clay cliff. We have a lot of them in the Yukon and the land is mostly sand based. Top soil for any lawns must be brought in.

Snow on the mountains. Winter is about a month away.

 

It was about 8pm when I went for this walk and it was amazing how quickly the light changed. This picture was taken about 5 minutes after the one above.

About 30 minutes into this walk, the sun was setting quickly and the sky was beautiful. I wish I could capture this in a dyed piece: 

 

And more sky pictures!

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Here comes the moon! I went home right after this picture was taken. These last pictures are about 1/2 hour from my house.

And this is just one of the trails I can walk right from my back yard!

 

 

Monoprinting—My Way

I love monoprinting when I get a creative block—and whenever I fancy a fast, fun and totally rewarding piece of pretty fabric.

Here is how I make a fast monoprint.

First, I squeeze out a few Setacolours onto my table. I have placed a large piece of plastic on the tabletop.

Here I used some yellow, orange and red on top, and blues/purples below.

Then I use a regular paint brush and paint straight lines across the table.

And here is the first ‘pull’.

I do this several times and in this case, my piece ended up like this:

 

This is just my latest piece. Really, nothing hard or special about it, but it demonstrates how to make an easy monoprint..

D’oh!

I have no idea how it happened, but I just changed my whole blog look and I do not like this one. I wanted a wider window so I could use less lines, hence less scrolling, but now look what I did. Darn it.

For now it stays. I guess I need to read up on blogs and appearances and …stuff.

Merikay Waldvogel’s Class

This week-end---ALL weekend--I have been taking Merikay Waldvogel's "quilt history" type classes. Our guild booked her last year, and I was poo-pooing the whole thing--stewing in silence because I am so NOT a traditional quilter, nor do I care about traditional quilting.

 

But was I ever wrong!

If you ever get to meet or take any of Merikay's classes or go to one of her talks, I urge you to do so. She is SO interesting. On Friday night she talked about the scandal at the 1933 world's fair in Chicago where thousands of quilts were entered and 2 of the judges quilt designs won.

 

Then yesterday she gave an intensive class on dating fabric as far back as 1850. That was so, so interesting. And she showed us at least 30 of her quilts and we dated them as part of our grade. Several women brought in their own oldie quilts and we admired them.

 

Today we did newspaper paper piecing (say that 10 times) with feed sacks from the 50's. I do paper piecing all the time, but this was way more fun. We all exchanged fabric strips and I just got a call from a women who was excited that she just finished 16 squares. It is 9pm.  :-)  lol

This is one of mine:

There are some teachers I love, some I admire and some I think should design rather than teach... Merikay is in the first category--she is a lovely, gracious and knowledgeable women. If I took her classes, when I don't even like or care about historical quilts and LOVED it, think how much you all might like it...

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PS--Last night and today I am reading her "Patchwork Souvenirs of the 1933 World's Fair" and it is even better than her talk! What an incredible writer she is......

Bye for now. I know, its a long post.  I was sooo excited!